Silent Pain - The Problem 53% of Pet Parents Miss!

Hello there this is Krista with Episode #178 on the Wag Out Loud pawdcast. Think about this. The sound frequencies that are produced during storms can actually be painful to your dog's ears. And the static electricity that accumulates in their fur due to any change of pressure can also be really unpleasant for them. So if your dog freaks out during storms, they're not just unsure of what's happening, but they may be experiencing a painful physical reaction as well.

Welcome to the Wag Out Loud pawdcast, where we are obsessed with bringing you helpful tips on canine health care, nutrition, and overall wellbeing. If you'd like to support the show, check out the amazing online events, products and resources that I personally recommend on the Wag Out Loud website. I'm your host, Krista and I'm super excited to be bringing you yet another tail wagging episode.

Dr.  Edward Bassingthwaighte is known globally as The Healing Vet. Through his own recovery from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Lyme, he explored holistic medicine and energy healing. He is the founder of a profoundly healing bodywork modality for pets, people and horses - the Whole Energy Body Balance™ Method.

Hello, dog lovers, thank you so much for being here today. I am so honored to have Dr. Edward Bassingthwaighte on the show. And he's going to talk about Silent Pain, which is a problem that 53% of pet parents actually miss. And I learned about Dr. Edward, probably three or four months ago, I think he was a guest on the Dog Gone Calm Club with Lisa Spector. And I was just so fascinated about his work and just had to have him on the Show. So Dr. Edward, thank you so much for being with us today.

You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. And it's really exciting to be able to share this information about Silent Pain because it's something that's really not known in the veterinary industry. And then of course, the general public have little or no idea about it too.

Well, I'm happy to share it with all of our listeners today. So why don't we start with you introducing yourself and why are you known as the healing vet?

Well, probably because I thought it was pretty cool brand name.

It is a cool brand name.

Because that brand name really is the essence of of what I'm about which is not only working one on one with people to help them give their animals the best possible life when it comes to holistic health care and vitality and, and longevity but also empowering pet parents to take their pets’ wellbeing into their own two hands. So I'm I'm deeply involved in online education in teaching people how to understand what holistic healthcare is how to implement it. And also I'm the creator of the Whole Energy Body Balance method, which is a profoundly healing, neuro fascial body work and energy work modality for pets, people and horses that are available for everyday people who want to be home practitioners and for for pet wellness professionals who want to be certified.

Well, you've got so many great courses, you're helping so many people and animals. Why don't we talk about I know, especially with dogs, that if they have pain, they most of the time like to hide it. So when they actually show signs of pain, isn't it that it's pretty advanced when we can see that they're in pain?

How to Notice That Your Dog is in Silent Pain

Well, yes and no, I think probably a good place to start is to talk about the difference between acute pain and chronic pain. Acute Pain is usually an injury to one part of the body, there's usually an abrupt increase in pain. And acute pain is super easy to see. There's a rapid change in the animal. There's obvious symptoms like a lameness or a sudden change in behavior becoming withdrawn, obviously unhappy, that sort of thing. So then that gives a lot of people a false sense of security that they are always going to be able to see any kind of pain in their animals, but unfortunately, chronic pain often develops slowly so that any changes if they happen are outside the ability of the human to see them. And another thing about chronic pain, soft tissue pain in particular, which is the most common cause of silent pain that I see is that it's often throughout the whole body. So therefore, there's no one part of the body like with a sore foot, you'll get a lameness. It's easy to see if you've got a dog with gastroenteritis, you'll get vomiting or diarrhea. And these symptoms are very specific to the problem so they're easy to see and pick up whereas chronic pain, chronic soft tissue pain in particular, what happens is that you get animals that might have a gradual change over months or even years. Maybe they get a little slower and stiffer and people just think oh, wow, you know, they're just old. That's normal. Shouldn't we don't need to worry about it? Whereas in reality, you can have animals with incredible levels of pain, chronic pain that they're existing with, but it's sucking a lot of the joy and, and life and connection out of their experience of, of living in relationship with their humans.

Yeah. Well, how did you come to realize that the statistic is 53% of our dogs are living in pain?

So some years ago, I missed really awful neck pain in my own little dog. That triggered me into getting curious about how many other people might be missing silent pain in their pets. And what I did was I did a small informal clinical study where I had 63 People come in the door with new dogs that I’d never seen before. And before I looked at their dogs and examined their dogs, I asked them, you know, do you think your dog has got any pain? And 53% of them said no, but when I got my hands on the dogs, the dogs had significant, really significant pain going on in their, in their body, soft tissue, chronic pain.

And how long ago was this realization for you?

Well, I realized a long time ago that there was a lot of undiagnosed neck and back pain. It's probably about 26 years ago, when I, I ran into another vet who worked with horses necks. He would take horses that had a falling lameness that they could not find a reason for, with no blocks, X rays, or that sort of thing. He'd released the vertebrae in the neck and the lameness would go away. So that was from nerve root compression. Now, that was all news to me, because I've never been taught a thing about that at university. So my next thought was, well, what about dogs and cats? They have necks and backs. So I started, you know, feeling with deeper into the body and with with more curiosity about what might be going on through the neck and spine. And pretty quickly, I started finding a whole lot of pain, tension, dysfunction, that before I started exploring more deeply into the body, I was missing. Now that's developed over the years, then I realized that there's the soft tissue, the neuro fascial tissues, throughout the body, store and hold pain and trauma. And they're also involved in anxiety and stuff like that. So it's been a kind of an evolution, but it's only about six or seven years ago, maybe eight years ago that I missed really awful neck pain in my own dog. And that's when I realized that, you know, I thought like a lot of people probably listening to this show right now probably think that they can that their pets will tell them when they have pain. And you know, I had probably a bit of veterinary arrogance running. I know veterinarians are a little bit prior to that kind of thing. But I thought I could look at my dog and tell when he had pain. Turns out, he had a very, very painful neck. He had a fall on the steps, which my wife actually saw, but he got up, shook himself off and seemed okay, so she didn't think to tell me, then a small change in behavior three weeks later, made me get my hands on him. And I found that he was in agony, but he was still not showing any signs to even my highly trained eyes.

Wow. So this soft tissue pain that you're talking about? What is the average age that in your mind, dogs start to suffer the silent pain?

When Do Most Dogs Start Feeling Pain?

Look, it can vary. Most dogs by the time they get somewhere to between five to eight years of age, you're going to have built up a significant amount of soft tissue pain. But at the moment, I'm working with an 18 week old when I first saw it, it's an 18 week old puppy. Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy who's already got incredible amounts of pain in his body. Now, whether that's from some kind of birth injury or some kind of puppy accident or whatever. So you just don't know even younger dogs can if they've had a bad crash when they're little puppies and crying, like playing like a mad thing can have a legacy of silent pain. I've seen a lot of dogs that after you know the routine, normal desexing operations are left with a legacy of soft tissue pain. You know, male dogs in the groin area, female dogs through the abdominal cavity. So there's a lot of different things that can can leave that kind of history or legacy and that gets locked up in the soft tissue in the neuro fascial network in the animal's body.

Well, why don't we break this down more? Because you say that silent pain is made up of three different areas. So there's physical, there's anxiety, and there's trauma? Can you unpack each of those?

Three Areas of Silent Pain

Well, physical pain is soft tissue pain that is in the soft tissues of the body now, particularly in what I call the neuro fascial network, which is the connective tissues of the body. And the connective tissues of the body have very high concentrations of nervous tissue in them. Especially a lot of sensory awareness. So the fascia is everywhere in the body. It is the scaffolding or structure of every other organ in the body on every scale of dimension. If you look at an x ray, you'll never see soft tissue pain on an x ray, it doesn't show up on imaging, which is another reason why I believe vets miss it. I mean, vet's have a knowledge and skills gap when it comes to feeling into the body to find this kind of pain. It's a particular skill that anyone can learn in a matter of weeks. But if it's like riding a bicycle, if you've never learned how to do it, you can't do it. So soft tissue pain, and neck and back pain there's quite a lot of neck and back pain is is actually soft tissue pain with muscle spasm, or nerve root compression, that sort of thing. So that's a big part, then trauma. So any animal that's got a traumatic history, a lot of that mental, emotional, and physical patterns of tension from the trauma are locked up in the physical structures and, and the emotions and, and the energetics of the body. So then when you do the neuro fascial bodywork and you release the physical patterns that are tied up with trauma out of the body, you can also have significant healing of the mental emotional side of things. And then trauma and anxiety are kind of similar in a way that in both trauma and anxiety, the nervous system is sensitized into a chronic state of unhealthy arousal. So there's this the animals are switched on to a low grade, or sometimes a high grade fight flight response, and they usually sensitized to trigger in a much higher levels of arousal very, very easily. So they then you know, begin to trigger a stimulus. And they go into a high orange or red zone very, very easily compared to a resilient, healthy dog that doesn't have trauma, or anxiety. Now, that has a double whammy, in that any kind of trauma and anxiety accelerates soft tissue pain development over time. And anxiety is bad for the nervous system, the immune system and a whole lot of other things. There's some of the Therapeutic Touch skills that we use the Whole Energy Body Balance method which are very powerful at causing a body level relaxation response, parasympathetic activation. So what happens then is that if you use these kinds of touch over time, you can move these anxious animals from this kind of chronic arousal, unhealthy arousal state into relaxation. If you work with these animals regularly, you know, day by day by day, over weeks and months, you can get very significant improvements in anxiety, sometimes quite rapid. For instance, I saw a dog called Clyde a few years ago who was a Staffy who had really severe separation anxiety. He was eating the house, when he was left alone. Two weeks of the whole family doing this body work with Clyde and I think he probably got 10 times as much body work as your average person would give their dog because the mother and both daughters just went to town on him. But two weeks later he was the destructive behavior was totally gone. He was fine to be left at home alone. And some days he was so chilled out about being home. He didn't get off his bed when his mom came home. So I think two things with anxiety. There's kind of four phases of anxiety. Two of them are easy to see people don't miss that's the fight one you get dogs that are reactive, lunging, barking, biting the flea, they're the dogs that running away hiding under things or bolting in the case of thunderstorms. But then you get the freeze, which a lot of people don't understand is actually anxiety when the animal goes still or become suppressed. And the fourth phase that a lot of people miss is the Fidget they're the ones that go nutso. Nutso, crazy jump all over. You don't listen to commands, that sort of thing.

Wow, a lot of people are probably saying yeah, I recognize these symptoms. Dr. Edward we are at a spot where it's perfect for us to take a quick break. So we are going to get into this therapeutic touch and how it works when we get right back. So hold on tight, everybody.

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Well, I don't know about you guys, but this is just fascinating to me. So we are going to continue our conversation with Dr. Edward and we are talking about Silent Pain. And yes, 53% of us are missing this you guys. So you're probably thinking, okay, so how do I advocate for my dog and make them feel better? So as we left in the first half, Dr. Edwards was talking about therapeutic touch and how it helped Clyde in just two weeks. So why don't we uncover this a little bit more? You mentioned that a lot of the silent pain is in the neck and the back? Where exactly are we talking, the entire spine? Or is it the base of the neck?

Where Does Most of Our Dogs’ Pain Reside?

It depends on the animal, you'll get one one dog or cat that I get my hands on that, you know might have an incredibly painful neck, then another one might be more painful in the thoracic. And you might get a third animal that's more painful in the lumbar or you might get some that are painful everywhere in the back and spine. And I think the spine really is the core of good health in the animals. So any any compromise to the spine is going to affect vitality, energetic integrity and a whole lot of other stuff. So I always focus in on the spine, but there's also the whole body, the neuro fascial network is everywhere in the body. So you need to have a kind of really whole body approach to get the best results.

And when we talk about therapeutic touch, we're not talking about canine massage, are we? This is different.

What is Therapeutic Touch?

Yeah, the Whole Energy Body Balance is different. It's a neuro fascial bodywork. So we're focused on the fascia on the connective tissues and the nervous system. That's that's what we're interacting with with touch. I've never actually trained in any hands on modality because 26 years ago, when I started finding neck and back pain, and then wanting to do something to help the animals, I started playing around with movement and pressure and various qualities of touch pretty quickly found that animals responded to that. And we got some nice changes and happier, more playful, more active pets. So what what I share with the world in the whole energy body balance method is a really comprehensive toolkit of different therapeutic touch skills, neuro fascial bodywork skills, that I've developed over 26 years of working hands on with with 10s of 1000s of animals. So it comes from direct experience, it comes from the animals teaching me what works for them. And we teach a really broad range of skills ranging from very gentle, subtle work like cranial sacral type connections, through to really powerful, but gentle release and mobilization of core structures of the body core structures and tissues, mainly around the spine.

And these courses are amazing for so many different reasons, not only are you healing your dog, you're healing yourself and the bond that you have with your dog. You know, some people might think it's woowoo thinking, Oh, I don't know if I have that energy healing in my body to be able to do this for my dog. But we do. And we just have to unlock it right?

Anyone Can Do It

Yeah, I think in our society, a lot of that this kind of stuff is actively denigrated, and a lot of us shut down a lot of ourselves in terms of our empathic and natural healing abilities at a pretty early age so that we we fit in to society, and we get what we need emotionally. But anyone can learn how to do this, if you've got two hands and a loving heart and a willingness to put in some time and learn. Most of our students see really beautiful changes in their pets within within weeks of starting the training.

Yep. And knowing all this. I know a lot of people that let their dogs sleep in the bed, jump off of the bed, jump off of the couch. What are your thoughts on that impact day in day out?

Well, I think you've got to let your dog live their life too. I think you take all care that you can and as they get older, perhaps you put in a ramp or steps or whatever for them to get on and off things. But I'm not a I'm not a wrap your dog in cotton wool kind of person. I think dogs need to have fun and live their life and you minimize high impact activities and you take care too, if you learn how to do this kind of body work, then you learn how to feel in the body and you won't miss things. Now, some animals can develop silent pain quite quickly, if they have an accident, or if they, you know, I think we've all had the experience of waking up after sleeping in a funny position. And our whole body’s all spasmed up and painful. And the same kind of thing can happen for our for our pets. So if you do regular hands on work with your animals, not only do you strengthen your bond and relationship with your pets, beyond what you probably think is possible, and I've had a lot of people come into trainings, and at the beginning, I'll often say this now look at me, I see them thinking, you silly vet, I've got the best relationship in the world with my pet. what are you thinking? It can't get any better. But nearly always, at the end of the training, those people come up to me and say, You know what? I didn't believe you when you said things could get better in terms of my relationship with my pets, but it absolutely has and very quickly. So there's there's a whole lot of benefits to this kind of touch based communication therapy connection work with your animals.

Absolutely. Well, I would think that not only your average dog, your average family dog, but also the canine athletes would really benefit from this body work, right?

Canine Athletes

Oh, absolutely. Because if you have an assistance dog, then they have a lot more wear and tear and impact on their body than your average household pet, or most household pets, unless you got someone who's got a ball addiction and the owner doesn't realize that throwing the ball all day is bad for the dog, they can get a lot of a impact injury too . So the earlier you learn how to do this, and the more often you do this kind of work with competition dogs, then the better not only do you prevent the development of silent pain and problems and make the animal stronger and better balanced, but they can they can compete better, because they've got more, they're more imbalanced, they're more aligned, their bodies are healthier. And the other really good thing about this kind of work for your competition dogs is that it helps them learn how to anchor into that state of healthy relaxation. So then you can engage drive, while you still have 100% of cognitive capacity online. Now I see a lot of agility dogs, when they get out to the start line there they are definitely in a state of arousal where they're not 100% able to connect with understand and respond to the communication coming from the handler. You know, if you can, you can get a dog that that can engage all of their drive and be in that healthy orange zone where all their cognitive capacity’s still online, then you're gonna get a dog that will do cleaner, faster runs, because they're listening. They're responsive, they're 100% connected to you and your directions.

Yes. And your method of this Therapeutic Touch. It doesn't exist anywhere else, you are the pioneer and thankful for you to be teaching this to not only pet parents, but other professionals that want to become practitioners Correct?

Well, I would say that I am one of the pioneers, there's certainly other therapeutic touch modalities out there. There's the pet massage guys in the US that are probably the true pioneers of of massage in pets and and you know, I can't remember his name but he was an inspiration to me and his book, I read and got some lovely information out of that. You've got T Touch you've got Bowen you've got a lot of other modalities but what I've noticed about what we have to offer is that it's there's there's a more comprehensive, broader, deeper range of skills compared to anything else that I've come across. And another thing that we do a lot in whole energy body balance is communicating with the animals understanding their nonverbal communication, expressing nonverbal communication, teaching animals how to yield to pressure in a healthy way so that they can be soft on the lead, not pull on the lead so that you can reposition them while you're working with them. Ask them to move over and they'll go yep, I can move over for you. And another thing that I teach a lot of is, is boundaries, healthy boundaries, how to have a healthy conversation with your dog about okay, I got personal space. Let's have a bit of a talk about how and when I'm going to invite you into my personal space and when I might like to ask you to stay out of my personal space for a little while which humans are diabolically awful at doing in a healthy way probably 90% of the time.

Yep. Well, you were talking about what your course offers and you have an amazing offer for our listeners. So do you want to tell them about your Masterclass?

FREE OFFER

Yeah, we offer a FREE masterclass, which is a two part masterclass. The first part is an information session where we, we spend a good hour going into depth talking about Silent Pain, what it is why it's easy to miss, red flags, subtle signs to look out for what you need to do to make sure that you never miss all that pain, how to treat it and prevent it. Then we have a second hands on session where you you will come along and learn some skills out of the whole energy body balance method, you'll learn the beginnings of how to feel in the body to find some silent pain and a beautiful skill called Webb Loving Touch, which is a gentle connecting relaxing, therapeutic touch interaction with your animals.

And I did both of these free master classes and you learn so much just there. And I unfortunately was not able to finish the entire course. Because as many of you know, we lost Winston back in January. But we are picking up our new puppy Dutton this week. And of course, he will know everything about WEBB method once we get him home and situated. So I know that the WEBB method is a healing somatic bodywork modality. Can you explain what is somatic mean?

What Does Somatic Mean?

Well, some somatic really means the body Soma in Latin is the body. So one of the key things and one of the points of difference for the whole energy body balance is that the first thing that we teach you is nothing to do with your animals, but everything to do with you. So there's an internal practice for the human for you, which is the WEBB somatic embodiment and energy connection practice. Now an interesting thing happens when you start to come into bring your awareness into your physical body and be present here in this, this this earth suit. I like to call it that we inhabit on this planet. The more you do that, in my experience, the happier you get. And if you've got trauma and other anxiety and other problems, if you can have the will and courage to come into your body and be present with healthy discomfort over time, then you'll get improvements and anxiety and you'll slowly unwind and resolve trauma we've we've had a number of clients of our students say that well, you know, I think this training has actually been more for me than my dogs. It’s been incredible for my dogs. But we've had a lot of people with anxiety and other issues, see big improvements in themselves with this work too.

Incredible. Well, I am going to have the link in the show notes for everybody that you should check out again, it's a FREE silent pain masterclass that I think everybody needs to sign up for. And this is healing, chronic pain, anxiety and trauma, not only in our pets, and ourselves, but you can also do work on horses as well. So Dr. Edward, where can everybody find out more information about you, your work as the Healing Vet, and your modality, this whole program, the Whole Energy Body Balance method?

Well just come along to www.wholeenergybodybalance.com You drop in there, you can search for the Healing Vet on Facebook, we've got a pretty active page on there as well. But that www.wholeenergybodybalance.com is really the heart of where we live online.

Social Media URLs or Tags

         Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_healing_vet/

         Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheHealingVet

Great. Well, again, everybody, all of these links will be in the show notes. And I encourage you to sign up for the masterclass for sure. And as we sign off today, Dr. Edward, do you have any parting words for us?

Get your hands on your pets. Now, you know, just one thing you can start doing is getting your hands on your pets and just slowing down the speed of your movement of your hands on your pets. Most humans use quite a fast hand speed which is stimulating. So just slow down you just you know you're the pets that your pet loves the most slower down to a quarter or an eighth or a 16th of your normal hand speed. And you'll notice that your animals will start relaxing much more strongly if you do that. And if you do that every day for five or 10 minutes, even that will make a big difference.

Beautiful. That's easy enough. Well thank you, Dr. Edward for all of your amazing work. And I'm excited for our listeners to check out everything that you have to offer.

Thanks for having me. It's been a blast.

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